Always a Cowboy

Judge Wilson McCarthy and the Rescue of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad

Will Bagley

Publication Year: 2008

Cowboy, judge, federal official, then business executive, Wilson McCarthy mirrored change and growth in the twentieth-century West. Leading the Denver & Rio Grande back from the brink saved a vital link in the national transportation system. The D&RGW ran over and through the scenic Rockies, developing mineral resources, fighting corporate wars, and helping build communities. The Depression brought it to its knees. Accepting federal assignment to save the line, McCarthy turned it into a paragon of mid-century railroading, represented by the streamlined, Vista-Domed California Zephyr, although success hauling freight was of more economic importance. Prior to that, McCarthy’s life had taken him from driving livestock in Canada to trying to drive the national economy as a director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the first line of federal attack on the Depression. Always a Cowboy positions McCarthy’s story in a rich historical panorama..

Will Bagley is the author of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Every historian hopes to learn something new when he or she undertakes
a project. As a writer who has dealt mostly with nineteenth-century
subjects, I knew I would have to learn a lot to write a credible biography
of a twentieth-century figure. But a key subject of this biography—the
West’s transformation from a colonial frontier based on resource extraction ...

Introduction

In the depths of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover appointed
an obscure Utah attorney and Democratic legislator to the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation (RFC), the powerful institution the Republican administration
launched in February 1932 to deal with the nation’s deepening
financial crisis. As a respected western stockman, lawyer, banker, and businessman, ...

One: Happy, Optimistic, and Good Company: Charles McCarthy Goes West

The American saga of Utah’s McCarthy family began when blight
struck the fields of Ireland. Black rot destroyed the island’s potato
crop in 1845. Over the next five years, famine killed a million Irish men,
women, and children and drove almost another million to seek a home
across the Atlantic Ocean. Among those who fl ed starvation aboard the ...

Two: A Prisoner for Conscience Sake: The Pen, the Railroad, and the Lord’s Vineyard

The Rocky Mountains have never been an easy place to make a living,
especially for farmers and ranchers dependent on the weather, but it
has always been, as Wallace Stegner said, the native home of hope. Rising to
the challenge of wrestling a living from unforgiving land in Utah’s difficult
and fickle climate inspired some men and women to dream dreams a reasonable ...

Three: We Have Always Been Sweethearts: Home on the Canadian Range

One of the unintended consequences of the federal campaign against
polygamy was the extension of Mormon Country south into Mexico
and north to Canada. Even though polygamy was illegal in both countries,
hundreds of Mormon colonists fled to Chihuahua in 1885, and within ten
years, more than three thousand Latter-day Saints had settled in ten colonies ...

Four: No Reversals: The Rapid Rise of Judge McCarthy

Charles McCarthy’s sons came of age on the Canadian prairie, but both
boys completed their high-school education in Utah. Young Charles,
his sister Marjorie recalled, “wanted business,” and so went on to train at
the high school associated with the Latter-day Saints University, now LDS
Business College. Wilson followed him and graduated in 1902, but his first ...

Five: No Fairy Godmother: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation

As America’s economic nightmare darkened, in early June 1932, the
president of the United States called together the seven directors of
the powerful new federal agency he and Congress had created to deal with
the crisis. The leaders of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation met
at the president’s private retreat, Camp Rapidan, high in the Blue Ridge ...

Six: The Tug of the West: A California Interlude

Dennis McCarthy’s busy father greeted him in New York when the
young man returned from serving in the LDS Church’s British Mission
in August 1933. He joined Wilson in Washington for several days at the
Shoreham Hotel. Minerva and the rest of the family had already decamped
to their new home in Piedmont, California, while Wilson wrapped up his ...

Seven: Dangerous & Rapidly Getting Worse: How to Ruin a Railroad, or the Checkered History of the Denver & Rio Grande Western

As Wilson McCarthy was wrapping up his work on the Denver & Salt
Lake Railway in November 1935, Federal Judge J. Foster Symes made
McCarthy an offer that was too good to refuse: the chance to save one
of the West’s great railroads from ruination. His service with the D&SL
had won him the respect of the most powerful men in Colorado, and they ...

Eight: Like a Drunken Gandy Dancer: Saving the Denver & Rio Grande Western

During 1934, the Denver & Rio Grande Western faced one financial
crisis after another—and there were no solutions in sight. Any talk
of sales, mergers, or consolidations had ceased, proclaimed Arthur Curtiss
James, the single largest stockholder of the Great Northern, the Northern
Pacific, the Southern Pacific, and the Western Pacific—and, some said, the ...

Nine: The Great Arsenal: The War to Save Democracy

Historians have long debated when the Great Depression began and
ended—and why. All but the most hidebound ideologues agree that
the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939 led to the revival of
the American economy. Business was more than reborn: over the next six
years, it boomed as the nation became what Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed ...

Ten: Rocky Mountain Empire: The Cowboy Judge

Shortchanging half the region’s population, it asserted, “The story
of this vast domain is the story of its men.”724 A photograph taken in the
late 1940s of one such man shows Wilson McCarthy, still trim in his mid-sixties
but looking somewhat weary, seated at his paper-strewn desk, his hands
folded before him and a cuspidor gleaming on the windowsill behind him.
Except for his obvious fitness, the judge appeared much like any other ...

Eleven: A Western Railroad Operated by Western Men: The Rio Grande Redeemed

The Americans who led their nation through the Great Depression and
World War II did not view their country’s prospects in 1945 through
rose-colored glasses. Like many of them, Wilson McCarthy cast a wary eye on
the future. Most economic forecasters expected the traditional economic
downturn that had always accompanied peace: almost no one anticipated ...

Twelve: Divers Projects of Imperial Proportions: The Judge and History

The name Wilson McCarthy appeared “frequently in connection with
divers projects of imperial proportions,” the Columbia Law School News
observed in 1951, and it was typical of the praise that his associates and
acquaintances heaped upon the judge as he entered his seventh decade. He
seemed more comfortable when the eulogies celebrated his railroad and its ...

Afterword: A Missed Opportunity: Judge McCarthy and an Alternate Vision of America’s Future

In December 1968, the Rocky Mountain News interviewed Harry Swan at
the restaurant at Denver’s Stapleton Airport, a dozen years after the death
of the co-trustee with whom he had engineered the redemption of the
D&RGW. Swan casually mentioned that if he and Wilson McCarthy had gotten
their way, “some of the big jets outside would be wearing the Rio Grande ...

Acknowledgments

As always, I am deeply indebted to a host of dedicated librarians and
archivists. I deeply appreciate the excellent service I received at several
great institutions, most notably the Colorado Railroad Museum’s Robert W.
Richardson Railroad Library, the Western History and Genealogy section of
the Denver Public Library, and the Colorado Historical Society’s Stephen ...

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